What became of CanLit?

Luminous Ink: Writers on Writing in Canada Edited by Tessa McWatt, Rabindranath Maharaj and Dionne Brand Cormorant Books

Some people say that the concept of Canadian Literature (caps intentional) was born in 1972, when the House of Anansi published Margaret Atwood’s Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature.

At once surveying what existed already and elaborating from that survey an aspirational notion of a national literature in Canada, a separate and important body of writing with as much gravitas and import as anything from New York or London, Survival was an important landmark in Canadian writing.

Atwood’s reflections on her iconic book and what has become of the concept of CanLit since is one of the most compelling essays in Luminous Ink: Writers on Writing in Canada, a new collection edited by novelists Tessa McWatt and Rabindranath Maharaj and poetnovelist-essayist Dionne Brand.

The editors see Atwood’s book as the beginning of CanLit, and while some, including this reviewer, would argue for the importance of works written earlier in any complete definition of a Canadian canon or canons, there is no question that something significant happened in this country’s writing and reading life in the 1960s and ’70s.

Riding on a tide of Canada Council grants ( grants made possible, as Nick Mount has argued in his recent Arrival: The Story of CanLit, by the postwar economic boom) and on the unpaid or poorly paid labour of writers and publishers and on a network of small presses and the coffee houses and bookstores where authors could launch their works, CanLit was a thriving phenomenon for decades.

Now, not so much, suggest the editors of this collection.

CanLit, if it exists at all, is currently a far more various and contested clamour of contending voices than it was in Atwood’s original formulation. Far more multi racial and multicultural than it was in the ’60s and ’70s, the CanLit reflected in this collection is an exciting body of work, but whether it makes sense to identify it with the nation state of Canada is not clear.

What is clear is that the editors have selected some of the best of what is being written and published here today.